DrVita.com is an online retailer that provides vitamin, nutrition, organic food, vitality, and health and wellness products to consumers wishing to enhance their pursuit of a happy, healthy, and active lifestyle. Facing intense competition from established online retailers, DrVita.com distinguishes itself in the market through product quality, competitive pricing, personalized customer service, and a world-class web presence. DrVita.com offers a window of opportunity for those looking for more information about health and nutrition.

DrVita.com sells more than 13,000 natural products from hundreds of manufacturers at competitive prices. The company has more than 250,000 customers and ships more than 1,000 orders a day via its online channel. It produces its own proprietary products made in its 72,000 square-foot, state of the art, Las Vegas facility with the latest, most technologically available equipment, employing quality ingredients. DrVita.com is 100% United States based.

DrVita.com’s Founder Wayne Gorsek is an American entrepreneur best known as a pioneer in the natural health world for his innovative vitamin formulations. He founded his first vitamin and supplement online retail company in 1994. As CEO, Gorsek oversaw the development of all the company’s top-selling products, some of which were his own patented formulations. From 1994 to 2009, he grew Vitacost.com into the highest-revenue-producing online retailer for vitamins, nutraceuticals and natural health products. Under Gorsek’s direction, the company earned Inc. 500 Hall of Fame Status for being the fastest growing business in the United States for five years in a row, and it achieved the Internet Retailer Top 500 Award.

Challenges

A word from DrVita.com

"We are building a strong foundation for our growing business with Oracle Endeca and Oracle ATG solutions. We’ve achieved impressive website performance and sales-conversion-rate gains, and have found a trusted partner in Oracle.” – Wayne Gorsek, Founder, DrVita.com

Ensure high availability and performance for the online retailer’s website, the primary sales channel for its more than 13,000 nutritional supplements and organic food products

Enable site visitors to quickly and easily find health products of interest to them

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

Deployed Oracle Endeca Guided Search to deliver highly accurate and targeted search results on the company’s e-commerce site that features more than 30,000 health product offerings, unlike the legacy solution that would often display hundreds of unrelated products

Gained the ability to deliver online search results in 1 second, versus up to 30 seconds, reducing the abandon rate

Tripled conversion rates from 2% (the industry average) on the legacy platform to 6% to 7%—with projections of achieving an 18% conversion rate

Enabled the company to customize and target searches to specific customers and their interests, including returning searches for related products that do not necessarily have the search term in the name—for example a search for CoenzymeQ10 also returns results for ubiquinol, a new form of the product

Expanded analytical and reporting capabilities that yield insight into the most frequent searches, click throughs, and abandons to drive future improvement

Selected Oracle ATG Web Commerce as the company’s new e-commerce platform, creating a robust site that can support millions of customers and rapid growth

Gained the ability to integrate the e-commerce platform with e-mail and payment processing systems, enterprise applications, and warehouse management system for streamlined processes

Why Oracle

“We originally went with another large vendor for our e-commerce platform and found that the solution did not give us the performance and flexibility we required,” said Wayne Gorsek, who founded DrVita.com and was founder and former chairman and CEO of Vitacost.com. “Our experience with Oracle has been 1,000 times better. Even though we are a small company, Oracle cares about our business and provides the service and support we need to fuel our growth. Also, Oracle delivers one-stop shopping for database, e-commerce platform, and search.”

Implementation Process

Oracle Partner Cirrus10, LLC helped DrVita implement Oracle Endeca Guided Search and Oracle Endeca Experience Manager in the six weeks, between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, allowing DrVita to apply the improved search, merchandizing, and product discovery features in Endeca during its highest traffic season, when the company sees an influx of New Year’s resolution shoppers.